Let no one think that this is a small matter. The acquisition of knowledge like this is not only of the highest importance in itself, but it will bring with it a vast amount of cognate information that now is much neglected. Geography will become what it should be, a popular science, because the immense value of it will be recognized. Economical science will also assume an interest which it has long lacked for all but the minutest percentage of fairly well-educated people. Politically, such an education of the people will be of the highest value, preventing them from being led away by clap-trap and jargon, and enabling them to understand why our country has risen to its present enviable height of prosperity, and how essential it is to the well-being of every man, woman, and child in the community that the peaceful flow of over-sea traffic shall never be interrupted.
Beyond and above all this there is the liquidation of the debt due to the sailor; the recognition of the fact in practical ways that without him we should not merely be without at least half of what he has taught us to look upon as the necessities of life, necessities which less than a century ago were looked upon as the highest luxuries, but that we should be a feeble population of slaves groaning under the iron rule of some military continental despot, who would rob us of our very blood and marrow, and give us in return leave to live that we might toil for him and his satraps until, early worn out, we were flung aside to die and obtain that liberty in death that we were denied in life. We want to atone as far as we may for our long neglect, through ignorance, and by our united intelligent efforts to show that at last we have awakened to the fact that in our Mercantile Marine we possess the most magnificent heritage ever built up for a free people by the courage and endurance of its sons.
THE END.
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WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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THE CRUISE OF THE 'CACHALOT' ROUND THE WORLD AFTER SPERM WHALES. By Frank T. Bullen, First Mate. The Volume includes a Letter to the Author from Rudyard Kipling.
TIMES.—'Mr. Bullen has a splendid subject, and he handles it with the pen of a master.... "The Cruise of the 'Cachalot'" is a book which cannot but fascinate all lovers of the sea, and all who can appreciate a masterly presentation of its wonder and its mystery, its terrors and its trials, its humours and its tragedies.'
The Rev. Dr. HORTON, in his Sermon on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, referred to Mr. Bullen's 'Cruise of the "Cachalot"' in the following terms:—
'It is a very remarkable book in every way: it seems to me worthy to rank with some of the writings of Defoe. It has absolutely taken the shine out of some of the romantic literature of such writers as even Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. By the strange law that truth is more wonderful than fiction, this book is more wonderful than the wildest dreams of the creator of imagination.'